“Sex Crime” or “Sexual Self-Determination”?

Announcement

This Saturday, 23rd of March, I will give a presentation at a symposium at Humboldt University of Berlin. The presentation is titled “Sex Crime” or “Sexual Self-Determination”? and deals with prostitution discourses in South Korea and their negative impacts on sex workers.

My presentation will start at 12pm in a session titled “Autonomy and Heteronomy in Sex Work”. The second presenter in this session is Ms. Noémi Katona who will give a presentation titled “Coercion, Money, and Intimacy: Hungarian Sex Workers and their Pimps/Boyfriends at Kurfürstenstraße”. Podcasts of these and other presentations will be made available in April. Please note that all presentations will be held in German only.

“Hurt Lives – Denied Rights. Human Trafficking in the 21st Century”

Despite heightened public attention to “human trafficking”, the definition of this phenomenon remains difficult and contested. On Friday, March 22nd, and Saturday, March 23rd 2013, the symposium “Hurt Lives – Denied Rights. Human Trafficking in the 21st Century” will take place at the ballroom of the Humboldt-Universität of Berlin at Luisenstraße 56 in Berlin-Mitte. Next to academic and field experts, young researchers will showcase their work in presentations and workshops. The symposium is intended both for a professional audience as well as everyone who is interested to learn more about this subject matter.

Please click here to visit the website of the symposium. (German only)

“Human Trafficking“

According to the International Labour Organisation, “20.9 million people are victims of forced labour globally, trapped in jobs into which they were coerced or deceived and which they cannot leave. … Forced labour is classified into three main categories or forms: forced labour imposed by the State, and forced labour imposed in the private economy either for sexual or for labour exploitation. The distribution of the global total number of victims by form of forced labour is shown in Figure 1. … Women and girls represent the greater share of total forced labour – 11.4 million victims (55%), as compared to 9.5 million (45%) men and boys…. There are 9.1 million victims (44% of the total) who have moved either internally or internationally, while the majority, 11.8 million (56%), are subjected to forced labour in their place of origin or residence. Cross-border movement is strongly associated with forced sexual exploitation. By contrast, a majority of forced labourers in economic activities, and almost all those in state-imposed forced labour, have not moved away from their home areas. These figures indicate that movement can be an important vulnerability factor for certain groups of workers, but not for others.” (Source: ILO 2012 Global Estimate of Forced Labour)